Thanks to http://b4bconnect.com/forum/topics/infographic-when-email-is-more-important-than-social-media?

Email Marketing with Constant Contact® brought to you by MC Design & Services, LLC is the easy, effective, and highly affordable way to get your message out to your potential customers and current clients. You'll create high-impact, professional-looking emails—quickly and with no technical expertise. And, most importantly, you'll build strong connections with your audience that lead to referrals, repeat business and loyalty.

With Email Marketing by Constant Contact, you can:

• Choose from more than 300 easily customized email templates or create your own from scratch.
• Create highly visual, professional-looking email newsletters and promotions in just minutes.
• Drive more traffic to your website with focused, targeted email communications.
• Build and manage your email list: import existing customer lists, add names individually, or capture contact information from website visitors.
• Measure your email campaign results instantly-check click-through rates, review new subscribers, and see who opened and clicked on each link so you can tailor your follow-up communications.
• Send automated communications to new sign-ups via an autoresponder tool.
• Communicate with your audience with confidence, knowing that Constant Contact will take care of getting your email delivered and keep you CAN-SPAM compliant.

Discover how the power of Email Marketing with MC Design & Services, LLC by Constant Contact can help you better connect with your customers, strengthen your relationships with them, and grow your organization.

First 2 Months are FREE, Cancel Anytime!  We provide 1st email design for FREE and offer ongoing Email Marketing campaign support!  Click here for details. 

*Be sure to email us for your free branded email design after you sign up here.

There is a trend I have noticed emerging from social media for service businesses: we are giving too much information away for free. We lull ourselves into giving away services and expertise that we should be charging for. Before we know it, no one wants to pay for what we have to offer.

Does this sound familiar? You try to gain attention to your business by running a smart campaign where you offer  a sampling of your service for free - maybe it’s a free consultation or download - and the people who take you up on your offer enjoy it, but never come back for the paid service. Why?

Maybe they have gone on to someone similar to you for another free sampling? Maybe they feel they got exactly what they needed from the initial free service.

Maybe people have now come to expect to get something for nothing.

There is psychology involved in this. You have heard the saying “you get what you pay for”? What do you think people perceive they are getting when it is free? I think most of us assume that something that costs more must be worth more – we attribute expertise we may not even know about to the person who is charging higher than the other.   This is a psychological effect called prestige pricing, which points to a strong correlation between perceived product quality and price. The higher the price the more likely customers are to perceive it has higher quality compared to a lower-priced product. According to psychologist Dr. Peter Shallard, “Being expensive cultivates an aura of expert and elite status”… “setting your price is the psychological equivalent of setting the value of YOU. Your life, your work, that thing you’ve poured your energy and soul into.” He recommends you ask customers who don’t want to pay your set value what they are comparing your price to; you and they may find it is not apples to apples. When Shallard first asked this question he found out his life-changing services were being compared to piano lessons!

But with a tough economy people have been forced to settle for less and to become used to it. And maybe we have convinced ourselves we are worth less in the process. So if you are going to offer something for free or discounted, what should you do?

• Always include the numerical value in your offer.

• Always include the time value in your offer - i.e., the actual time the service will take (example: a thirty-minute consultation for $30). According to a study from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, marketing time sells better than marketing money because our relationship with time is much more personal than our relationship with money.
  

• Make them pay a little. With even a small “buy in” made on the customer’s part, a psychological commitment is made. There will be a tendency to continue with the service because they are already invested and don’t want to feel they have lost that initial $5.00. This is known as loss aversion - studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.
  

• Make them pay more than a little, but include the original price. According to research by cognitive and mathematical psychologist Amos Tversky and Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who also were the pioneers in proving loss aversion, creating an anchoring bias has a very strong psychological effect (the anchor being the original price in this example). If consumers are unsure about the price they will look around for comparative prices – you provide them with the price to compare with.
  

• Offer coupons. Your potential customers will feel they are getting a deal and you still get paid. Again, include monetary and time values in your offer.
  

• Social media posts that show you are well versed in your field – statistics, what famous people say about it/quotes, questions that get people thinking about their need for your service. Do NOT give away your service in bite-sized portions.
  

If you don't want to believe the psychologists, why not listen to conventional wisdom? This is just one more example of my belief that SEO and Online Marketing rules are like dating ... what is it your mother always told you about why buy the cow and giving away its milk?